MQtv Talking Point
Discussing the Big Issues

I sat opposite a tower of books in MQtv editor David Myton’s office for our second meeting. A black, plastic-covered book titled, blog! (by David Kline and Dan Burstein) topped the pile. It was only last week when I was informed of my new role as the MQtv blogger. How appropriate, I thought.

Last year, media students complained that our degree lacked a practical element. After all, universities such as UTS and UWS incorporate professional internship strands into their communications degrees, why not Macquarie? MAS 300 was introduced this year, as part of the Media Department’s initiative to incorporate internships in the B Media degree. I was lucky enough to be one of three media students selected to intern for MQtv.

This was within weeks of first discovering the MQtv website even existed. Impressed by Margaret Pomeranz’s admiration for the website, I continued to explore, equipping myself with knowledge, for my first meeting with David.

I made my way down to the over air-conditioned, security-guarded building, E11A. In my mind, I had already prepared answers to questions David might ask. For some reason, I thought we would explore my interests as a starting point for discussing topics I’d like to write about. My interests? That was easy, I had that question down.

Now, I know I shouldn’t have been shocked when he asked, “Have you written in anything before?” I am a writing student, after all. But I was shocked. Why didn’t I think of that question. I sat there - my thoughts jumbling around my head. I used to own a blog, when blogspot.com was more popular than MySpace. Does that count? In primary school, I owned a Backstreet Boys fan site and distributed monthly newsletters to people who joined my mailing list. Does that count? That could count. Oh, how I wanted to lie, “Yes. I contribute to online music websites and have tried getting published in free street press magazines.” But I told the truth, “Well, apart from the writing subjects at university, this is my first time writing.”

Silence.

“Well, do you want to be a writer?” David asked. Me, a writer? In my mind I flashed back to my dream jobs - writing for National Geographic, working for Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, marine biologist, diplomat,writing for Rolling Stone, dancer, scuba diving instructor,travel writer, restaurateur. I am still young - must I decide now? But I answered, “Well, it’s always been in the back of my mind.”

Oh, I feel so little. Maybe, I shouldn’t be here. Maybe, instead of selecting students with the highest GPA they should select students with credible writing submissions. Maybe, I’m over-reacting, just a little. But regardless here it is – my first blog for MQtv.

The next week, I had my first tutorial for MAS 310 – Advanced Print Media Production 1. The first question, “What degree are you doing? What do you want to be doing next year?” At least this time, the answer was easy. Next year, I’ll still be at university completing my law degree. Well, everyone needs something to fall back on.

It seems everyone wants to be a writer. A couple of days ago I Googled “creative writing” and got 94 million search results, with 1,210,000 in Australia. Courses, tips, ideas, workshops, online communities – they were all there, indicative of huge demand.

What’s it all about? Can you actually learn to be a writer, or is it an innate creative gift rather than a craft to be learned?

Well, there are lots of reasons people study creative writing, says Macquarie University’s Dr Jane Messer, and not everyone wants to be a published writer.

“Here we are in a very cultured, very affluent society where we are constantly encouraged to consume the creativity of others - be it books, music, film, art, or just looking at fabulously funny, creative, weird advertisements,” says Jane, who teaches and convenes the Master of Arts and Postgraduate Certificate in Creative Writing http://www.engl.mq.edu.au/postgrad/ma_creative_writing.htm

“We are flooded with information, with commentary, which we are expected to be receptive to, to take in, to think about. To my mind isn’t it an excellent response that some of us, and possibly a growing number of us, want to produce our own words, own ideas, own images, own commentaries?”

Many people who take creative writing courses don’t want to be professional writers; only a few have that ambition.

“They want to write something good, and really like it if other people like what they’re doing. They want to express themselves, to explore ideas or memories. They want to find a way of making things they’ve imagined or experienced coherent, to make it into something – even just a paragraph or a short story.”

People from a wide range of backgrounds take Jane’s courses, but all have some experience with writing before enrolling.

“They tend to have come to a point where they feel they can’t advance their work without being part of a structured learning community. What can be better than spending, say, two hours talking about writing and reading and books and texts and drafts?”

So will a creative writing course turn you into a creative writer?

“It has to come from the person, their own interest and their own discipline, their own thoughtfulness and powers of observation,” says Jane.

“People have to read. There’s no point thinking you are going to write something wonderful if you never read anything, or you only read books from one particular genre. You need to read widely, expose yourself to a diverse range of books, ways of expression, uses of language, approaches to form, to story telling.”

And some people are naturally gifted, more connected to their imaginations, and ambitious to succeed as writers.

There are some things to consider before enrolling in a course.

“Writing takes time,” says Jane, “and they will need to make time to write if they’re not doing that already

“I tell my new students they will need to watch less television, see fewer films, and possibly get up an hour earlier. Writing’s not something you can do on the run and expect finesse.”

Students will need to ask themselves tough questions - are you censoring yourself too much? Will you be able to break through into a new imaginative field?

“People when they’re writing have a lot of self-censoring habits – at some point you need to say ok, am I going to live with this any longer or am I going to put it aside because I really want to leap forward in my work. The writers we want to read take risks in their writing.”

Jane is the author of several books (http://www.engl.mq.edu.au/staff/people_messer.htm) with a new one – Provenance – just published.

“Publication time is very exciting but also a time of great anxiety. I’ve had a relationship with these words for so long, in this case 10 years, and I’ve really cared about this story and tried to make real the vision I had for it. And here it is and I hope that it will be read in some way like I imagine I’ve told the story.”

Jane Messer’s key tips for creative writers

• Be disciplined – make time to write.
• Battle through the bad times. Keep writing.
• Write, revise, rewrite, rethink, write. Every page is a draft.
• Read like a writer – observe language and rhythm and other techniques writers use to evoke character.
• Extend yourself with language – push for new ways of description.
• Learn what cliché is and avoid it.
• Read widely, including world literature.
• You can’t watch the film instead of reading the book.

To find out more about the Department of English go to http://www.engl.mq.edu.au/index.htm

David Myton
Editor

It has happened again - a Muslim cleric in Australia has hit the headlines with an outrageous comment about women and sexual violence. Last time it was Sydney’s Sheik Faiz Mohamad, who in 2005 (see here) was recorded lecturing in these words: “”A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world …

Strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts…all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature.” Sheik Faiz likened uncovered women to sheep, put in the way of hungry wolves. This time, women were likened to “uncovered meat”, put in the way of hungry cats.

Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali made the comments in a Ramadan speech in September. He was elaborating upon an observation by Islamic scholar al-Rafihi, on who is to blame for any “rape crime”:”If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.

… If the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.

…The woman was behind Satan playing a role when she disobeyed God and went out all dolled up and unveiled and made of herself palatable food that rakes and perverts would race for. She was the reason behind this sin taking place.” (Read more of the transcript here) Of course, like many others, I find these comments appalling.As a feminist, especially, I want to speak up against these ideas. As an anti-racist, however, I do not want to contribute to any backlash in Australia against ordinary Muslims. Should I keep silent? For a number of reasons I have come to the decision that it is not a good idea to keep silent, in Australia, on the question of Islamist culture and harm to women. For one, the right is making mischief of the issue (see Miranda Devine, Pamela Bone, Paul Sheehan).

For another, I do not believe that there is no reality behind the media beat-up. For another still, we could do with more analysis and intervention. It is a very bad idea to leave all public discussion in the hands of our shock jocks, extreme nationalists and current political leaders.

Peter Manning has made a significant contribution to the public discussion, with a careful defence of the Australian newspaper’s coverage of the Sheik al-Hilali affair (here). The intercession is unorthodox, for the left, and very welcome. I take issue, however, with his framing of the Sheik’s discourse: “The difference for Hilali is that he’s out of time and out of place. This is Australia in 2006, not Egypt in the 1970s.” Manning’s perception, that the ideology comes from some superseded, pre-modern or pre-feminist age of customary prejudice, is a widely held one. We see it in the Australian’s editorial of 28 October 2006: the Sheik’s “retrograde attitudes” are “out of step with modernity”, “primitive”, “stuck in the 10th century.” I think this is mistaken. It is not some hangover of tradition, or ignorance, slowly but surely being eclipsed with our enlightenment. It is not the stubborn remnant of a patriarchal past. There is an Islamist radicalising of the old value of “modesty” in women that is entirely emergent and contemporary.
It finds its double in North America, in the efforts of fundamentalist Christians - and Modesty Zone’s Wendy Shalit - to rework the requirement of modesty in women, for a post-9/11, Christian-West investment in “moral values.”

Shalit’s target is raunch culture. Her new book, to be released in 2007, is titled Girls Gone Mild. Girls Gone Wild, of course, is the outfit that Ariel Levy (in Female Chauvinist Pigs) says is leading the mainstreaming of pornography in the U.S.A. Its capitalising on the new exposure of women’s bodies is defended in the name of “feminism,” and “freedom” - the freedom that George Bush wants to bring to the world via Afghanistan and Iraq.

One might think that the last thing a Christian-Right Presidency would want, for American women, is a hypersexualising, self-promoting display of their claim to licence. On the contrary. A Western-style “freedom for women” is a key emblem of its campaign in Afghanistan and Iraq. Women don’t have to wear the veil, in America. Women don’t have to appear modest, in America. And besides, a Christian Party can have its Babes, and its conservative moral values too. Levy finds it all a bizarre contradiction, but as Chaudhry says: “make no mistake, raunch is Republican.”

In its C21st context, it is a dangerous game that is being played on the bodies of women. Modesty, its saving grace and its paradox, has been with us for centuries: “the woman is constructed as seduction - to be forever punished for it.” (Tseëlon, 1995: 5) But this is something new, coming not from the past, but from the present - from the far off, ungrasped present. The scale is different. It has taken on the proportions of an imagined “clash of civilizations” where the lone woman on the street –in a miniskirt, or in a burqa - can seem to represent, for some, the legitimate target of cultural righteousness and revenge.

I submit that the “punishment” of rape and other sexual assault on women in Australia will only escalate, in current conditions, if we continue to misrecognise the discourse that legitimates it. It is not a relic of the past that will die out with the spread of feminism. Feminism, as “raunch,” is being used to draw women further into identification with the Bush-led “West.” There is only more crisis and confrontation in the future of Empire capitalism and its “others”.

Dr Judy Lattas,
Director of the Macquarie University Institute for Women’s Studies

I invite respectful comment on the opinions offered in this column.

Image: Punch and Judy illustration by George Cruikshank, 1827 

The idea of ‘culture’ is manifest in an endless variety of contexts and applications. It has been associated with the production, consumption and critical appreciation of art, music and literature at all levels as well as the way of life of particular groups. It has also been applied more loosely to patterns, modes or genres of expression and behaviour that transcend any one specific group. For some academic disciplines or groupings, notably anthropology and cultural studies, the concept is central to their respective enterprises, although it is by no means defined or deployed in the same way. In the study of politics, the culture concept has also had a long and interesting career, especially in relation to the delineation of national communities and their political claims. From the eighteenth century onwards, writers such as Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Burke, J.S. Mill, and Bagehot, among others, were very much taken with the idea of ‘national character’ which embodied ideas that we would now recognize more explicitly as referring to ‘culture’. In the mid-twentieth century, national character was superseded by the idea of ‘political culture’ which remains a highly influential concept, especially in comparative politics.

The relationship between politics and culture has come into much sharper focus in recent years with the rise of ‘identity politics’. Although this phenomenon is nothing new, it seems to have flourished in the conditions of the post-Cold War period as a vehicle of political expression while ideas about ‘ideology’ – at least as understood in terms of the traditional left/right spectrum – have receded. For some, ‘culture’ has become the new battleground, either literally or figuratively, as various causes assert their legitimacy through one or more of a range of cultural factors – religion, ethnicity, language, a shared history or set of myths and symbols, a special relationship to a territory, and so on. Here, cultural claims are necessarily allied with moral claims which in turn support specific political agendas. Many seek to redress past injustices. Many, if not most, are also peaceful, seeking a way forward through persuasion, negotiation and mediation. But for others, ‘culture’ involves reaching for the proverbial gun, and the casualties of ‘culture wars’ run into the tens of millions.

Whether peaceful or violent, identity politics carries an implicit assumption that the essential meaning of ‘culture’ is to be found in its capacity to function as a marker of difference between human groups or communities. It further implies that the essential cause of conflict lies in the mere fact of cultural difference. This certainly underscores the approach taken by supporters of the ‘clash of civilizations’ scenario, outlined by Samuel Huntington in the early post-Cold War period, and apparently vindicated by the events of 11 September 2001 when landmark targets in the US came under attack by a terrorist group purporting to act in the name of Islam.

For the student of politics, this may suggest that the first question we need to ask is how does culture cause conflict? My view is that this is the wrong question to ask. ‘Culture’ itself does not ‘cause’ anything. A better way to proceed is to ask: ‘How, or under what circumstances, does ‘culture’, or ‘cultural identity’, become politicized, and become politicized to the extent that it becomes dangerous? What other factors, such as access to resources, underlie the conflict? And whose interests are served by the perpetuation of prolonged conflicts?

Another problem with the recruitment of the culture concept as a major marker of difference between human groups is the tendency to endorse ideas about cultural determinism. This simply replicates some of the older problems of biological determinism that long underscored racist ideas and which early cultural anthropologists vehemently opposed. Critical commentators in both anthropology and cultural studies now recognize that the use of the culture concept to set up rigid dividing lines between groups represents not the denial of racist categories of human difference, but rather their reaffirmation under a new banner.

More generally, the notion of culture as constitutive of difference too often leads to a conception of culture as static and unchanging, fixed and timeless. Furthermore, the stress on the way in which culture divides and differentiates human groups not only blinds us to the fact that ‘difference’ may sometimes simply be a matter of idiom, or that conflict is somehow ‘caused’ by cultural differences between groups, it can also blind us to other ways of understanding what culture is and what it can do.

The conceptualization of culture in any sphere of politics needs to give much more prominence to its dynamic properties. Rather than seeing culture as a force that acts as a rigid determinant of human attitudes and behaviour, there is a strong case for arguing that change and transformation takes place through something called culture. It follows that the culture concept requires restating as a highly complex and contingent process rather than an objective, concrete ‘thing’ that defines the foundations for political communities and/or value systems. Understood as a process, culture moves from a thing which a people possesses, or which possesses them, to a dynamic that enables change and adaptation as well as sustaining continuity and predictability.

Cultural change can obviously lead to both negative and positive outcomes. The limits to cultural adaptability and inventiveness must be recognized as well. But for any form of study that deals with relationships between groups – as world politics does – it is imperative to understand that the capacity to interact lies in the dynamics of culture itself. Things may well be done differently in ‘foreign countries’, but the fact that we are cultural creatures in the first place implies the ability to learn to navigate around new and different situations and to extend the capacity for intersubjective communication well beyond our immediate social, cultural and political contexts. Viewed in this way, it is not ‘culture’ that throws up barriers to understanding and interaction, but ‘culture’ that actually enables it.

By Stephanie Lawson

Stephanie Lawson is Professor of Politics and International Relations. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of New England, the Australian National University and the University of East Anglia (UK). Her current research focuses on issues concerning culture, ethnicity, nationalism, and democracy, and combines comparative and normative approaches to the study of world politics. Her most recent book, Culture and Context in World Politics, is published by Palgrave. Other recent books include International Relations: A Short Introduction (Polity Press, 2003), Europe and the Asia-Pacific: Culture, Identity and Representations of Region (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and The New Agenda in International Relations: From Polarization to Globalization in World Politics? (Polity Press, 2001).